0 Chive flower vinegar

At this time of year the garden is bountiful, full of promise and flowering its heart out. I have always had a passion for herbs considering them some of the most useful plants in the garden, as they combine culinary and medicinal uses with great texture and form and in the case of chives stunning flowers too.

Chives, spikey pinky purple flowers erupt from the top of the plant, they are attractive to insects and attractive to me. The flowerheads are a great addition to a salad, but to capture their lovely sweet spicy oniony essence for a little longer you need to make chive flower vinegar. This lovely light vinegar is ideal in salad dressings, with fish or just to ring the changes and its such a gorgeous colour.

All you need to do is collect enough chive flowers to lightly pack your chosen jar and then select your vinegar, white wine or champagne vinegar works well as it allows the lovely flower colour to be extracted to create a pinky hue to the condiment. You leave the flowers steeping until the vinegar is your desired hue and has the required level of chive flavour. You could also make this with wild garlic or garlic chives but the resultant vinegar wouldn't be such a beautiful colour.

I am also adding this to the lovely Lavender and Lovage's Cooking with Herbs challenge 

                                          

Detail: Chive flower vinegar

0 Chocolate vinegar cake

National Chocolate week, how come I managed to nearly miss this ? obviously as someone who loves chocolate I would have thought that it would have been on my radar for weeks but some how it almost passed me by. (Hence the lateness of this post)
In celebration I have reworked a vinegar cake using a stunning Ellseys fruit vinegar and cocoa powder. Vinegar cakes are fairly allergy friendly as they don't feature eggs and use alternative measures to raise and set the cake.

After a busy day at blog camp on Saturday, where I learned loads, my baking needed to be the fairly fast and dirty kind, as the cake only takes about 40 minutes to cook it fitted the bill perfectly.Apologies to anyone who doesn't like recipes in cups but I love them and my original vinegar recipe is an american one, so cups it is.

Ingredients

• 3 cups of plain flour
• 2 cups of granulated sugar
• 1/3 cup cocoa powder
• 2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil
• 2 cup warm water
• 1tbsp vanilla
• 2 tbsp vinegar ( any type but malt, I used a fruit vinegar)

Method

• Prepare a baking tin of approx 13 by 9 inches - grease and line
• Pre heat oven to 180c / 350F
• Mix all ingredients together tin a bowl, sieve all the dry ingredients in first, then add the wet ingredients last
• Ensure mixed throughly and then pour into your prepared tin
• Bake for approx 40 minutes until tested cooked with a skewer
• Allow to cool in tin

If you fancy ringing the changes why not add spices too ! this is a lovely easy bake , nicely squidgy after only 24 hours and well flavoured and no hint of vinegar at all. You could ice it if you so wished.

Detail: Chocolate vinegar cake